The Livescribe Echo combines the flexibility of handwritten note taking with the power of digital document management to make your notes more useful, and Livescribe Connect makes your notes easier to access and share.

In the curious product category of connected, voice-recording, pen input devices, Livescribe pretty much dominates. Its latest, the Livescribe Echo Smartpen ($99.95-$199.95 direct, 2-8GB) has a slimmed down design and a host of new collaborative applications on the horizon. Still, the Echo's greatest strengths are the same things that made its predecessor, the Pulse, so innovative. It excels at recording written notes, syncing them with live audio recordings and providing you with an easy way to manage digital copies of both. The new Livescribe Connect software even lets you upload notes to Evernote, Google Docs, and elsewhere. All that makes it a neat tool for students, journalists, businesspeople, or any other note-taker.

Design
Despite being a bit slimmer than the Pulse, the 0.5 by 6.2 by 0.8 inch Echo is still a bit unwieldy. The rubberized tip helps your grip, but the 1.3-ounce device feels more like a big magic marker than a pen. We also have a quibble with the standard ballpoint tipfor $100-plus can't you at least get a decent rollerball? The good news is the tip is replaceable. There's a single-line OLED screen that shows the time and lets you navigate the pen's menu options, but other than that, all you'll see is a micro-USB port and a Power button.

Nestled inside the tip of the Echo pen is a high-speed, infrared camera that captures 70 frames per second. This camera captures anything you write, as long as it's on the specially imprinted, not-quite-white notepaper the company supplies. Connect the pen to your PC, and you can download digital copies of your handwritten notes. Pretty cool already, but there's more.

The Echo also has a built-in microphone that records audio as you write. Want to find out what the professor was saying when you were taking your notes? just tap a spot on the paper and click Play, and you'll hear exactly what he was saying as you wrote in that spot. During testing, I used the Echo to record a conversation I had with some industry executivesI was able to hear their voices clearly, and even distinguish among them. I could pick up sound of my pen scratching on the page as well, but it wasn't overwhelming.

Livescribe Connect
When you're finished taking notes, you can play back the audio on the pen or export it to your Mac or PC, where every stroke of your Echo pen is shown as the audio plays back. The combination of text and audio is called a pencast, and it can be played back on the smartpen itself, or on your computer. Pencasts let you turn your notesor more specifically your note-takinginto a flash-based video that you can embed on the Web. My notes tend to be an illegible scrawl, and I don't generally speak when I make them, so it isn't for me; for creative types who want to, say, document and share a visual brainstorming session, it's pretty cool.

We know it's cool because LiveScribe's site has a forum where you can post your pencast. There are a surprising number of them online, including "5 Killer Marketing Strategies" and "Making Sushi," for examplethe selection is wide. Watching the authors' words flow onto the page in synchronicity with the audio is voyeuristic, but potentially quite educational.

Livescribe Connect, which arrived as a firmware update in May 2011, lets you upload your own pencasts to the Web and access them from a variety of different places. With just a few taps of the smartpen, you can send your notes and pencasts via email, or to Google Docs, Evernote, Facebook, Mobile (iPhone and iPad) and MyLivescribe (an online storage space for pencasts). Once you set up your Connectorsbasically just inputting your name and password for the various servicesuploading your notes is simple: Draw a line back and forth on the page, underneath your notes. The smartpen will beep and the LCD will say "Command?" Write "Evernote," or "Google," and then tap once on each page you want to upload and twice when you're done. Next time you dock your pen, everything gets uploaded. All of the Livescribe Connect apps can open PDF files, and a couple, like Evernote, can even search the text within them. All support the pencast features, since it's just Flash embedded in a PDF.

The Livescribe Connect software worked well, except that it occasionally had trouble understanding poor handwriting. Fortunately, all of the commands are so different that the smartpen does a good job of guessing through the chicken scratch. The process did feel a bit kludgy, since you have to dock the pen to a computer in order to upload pencasts because there's no wireless capability on the pen. Also, you can only email contacts you have already stored on the smartpen, so I found myself just emailing the notes to my address and then forwarding them on later.

Performance and Apps
Getting your notes and complete audio records of meetings and classes downloaded onto your computer (Mac or PC) is the real reason to use the Livescribe. The Echo comes in 2GB ($99.95), 4GB ($169.95), and 8GB ($199.95) models, which can store between 200 and 800 hours of audio. My advice is to get your recordings off your pen as quickly as possible and onto your computer or the Web, where it's easier to manage everything. Navigating solely through the pen is a little awkward, though certainly possible.

There are more than 60 applications currently available for the Livescribe Echo. Some are useful (American Heritage Dictionary) some are less so (Guitar Chords for Beginners? On a pen?), but I am skeptical about the pen's ability to support an app platform. Besides, with such cool, useful core functionality, I am not sure that Livescribe needs an app platform.

The Livescribe Echo is a high-tech bridge between analog, handwritten notes and the digital world. Synced audio and text makes notes even more useful, and Livescribe Connect makes those notes available everywhere you need them. Though using its features, and even just handling the hefty pen, can take some getting used to, this is a writing instrument any gadget geek will love.

Livescribe Echo Smartpen (With Livescribe Connect)

Bottom Line: The Livescribe Echo combines the flexibility of handwritten note taking with the power of digital document management to make your notes more useful, and Livescribe Connect makes your notes easier to access and share.

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About the Author

Dan Costa is the Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com and the Senior Vice President of Content for Ziff-Davis. He oversees the editorial operations for PCMag.com, Geek.com, ExtremeTech.com as well as PCMag's network of blogs, including AppScout and SecurityWatch. Dan makes frequent appearances on local, national, and international news programs, including ... See Full Bio

David Pierce is a junior analyst on the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team. He’s a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, and got his journalistic experience (and a tech itch) working with David Pogue at the New York Times and interning at Wired. When not writing and editing, you’ll find David either playing Ultimate Frisbee, extolling... See Full Bio

Livescribe Echo Smartpen (With ...

Livescribe Echo Smartpen (With Livescribe Connect)

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